Zeitgeist App

A couple of days ago I discovered a new app called Zeitgeist by Marcel Wichmann.

It’s basically like Twitter – but you only post to yourself! I really like the minimalist but thoughtful implementation.

Day One has been my go-to journaling app for years (current daily streak at 1,868 days). The issue I often have is that sitting down at the end of the day and trying to remember the important things that happened is hard, and I am sure I sometimes miss documenting meaningful thoughts or experiences along the way. However, I don’t want to give up on Day One, because I like it very much in general.

So, how can I use both?

Fortunately, Zeitgeist allows you to export your entries in a very convenient format: each entry is a markdown file, named by date/time.

Since I’ve wanted to get my hands dirty with Apple’s Shortcuts app for a while now, I thought I’d try creating an automatic importer from Zeitgeist to Day One.

It works like this:

You select the date you want to import

Then you select the export .zip file (Unfortunately, I cannot (yet?) export from Zeitgeist via Shortcuts – that would be very cool though!)

It finds the right folder and filters the files by the date I selected earlier

Then it combines the content of all those files for the day (removing the metadata, but I could probably extrat the location 🤔)

It also removes the date but keeps the time in front of each entry

Finally, it creates a new daily entry for the selected date in Day One

The same entry in Zeitgeist and then imported into Day One

I’m quite happy with how this turned out and plan to use Zeitgeist for the next few weeks to see if it will stick.

PS: I am very much looking forward to the possibility of @-mentioning people. They will (fortunately) never get a notification from this, but it will enable filtering entries by people (I assume), which is a great idea. Day One should implement this feature ASAP!